Working At Home In Vasteras Sweden

What keeps lots of people from working at home?

Simple… it’s the lack of broadband access. That’s why the places with the lowest costs of living and where people could work at home and thrive on $30,000 to $60,000 per year working 40 hours per week are being left in the dust in places the telecoms choose to ignore.

I don’t know how many people in Vasteras, Sweden DO work at home, but at least they COULD if that work involved broadband.

From Technology Evangelist

Tim Scott presented a case study on how Vasteras, Sweden has positioned the fiber to the home network they’ve built over the past 4-5 years.

City felt under served by telecoms, so they decided to build their own gigabit ethernet metro network for 40,000+ residents and 2,000+ companies. Rather than offering an exclusive contract with a connectivity firm, they decided to contract the construction, then own and control the network as they saw fit.

Their rationale is that bandwidth should be built as a public utility, much like sewer, where homes are hooked up and charged a monthly access fee.

After the network was built, it was opened up to allow a variety of services to run on the network, including ISPs, gaming services, community information, movie and music services.

Vasteras has achieved an 80% take up rate for the service. This was partly due to announcements where they let consumers know that fiber to the home hook-ups would be available on certain days for a certain price, but would cost more if they chose not to hook up when the major roll-out was taking place.

The community site includes a portal that lists all available ISPs with their offerings, such as bandwidth options and price. Taking things further, it includes an average consumer ranking of each service. Over time, the previous incumbent ISP has ranked last among providers, showing the power of competition on the open network.